Data Mining

What we’re doing

We’re looking at data about energy use in households, businesses and transport that has previously been collected by government and international agencies. In this way we can we can build on existing knowledge and also identify any gaps in knowledge.

What we’ve found out so far

There are some interesting trends in greenhouse gas emissions and energy use in different sectors and in transport, which will be reported on soon. Some highlights are:

Road use has by far the highest greenhouse gas emissions of all transport modes, and this has increased markedly since the 1990s. Most of this is private car use.

In the mid-2000’s, transport overtook industrial as the sector with the largest total energy use.

Vehicle kilometres travelled per person appears to have peaked and started dropping since the late 2000’s. This trend has also been observed in a number of other countries around the world, including the USA.

We’ve found an interesting gap in knowledge: No-one seems to know about the amount of energy used, kilometres travelled, and other aspects, of motor vehicle use split between business and non-business use in New Zealand.